The stakes are high in Marissa Mayer’s appointment July 16 as the latest CEO of struggling Internet giant Yahoo Inc.

As the Wall Street Journal put it, within hours of the news, the “real conversation” began. Namely, can a first-time mom (Mayer’s son is due in early October) master the challenges of parenting while executing a turnaround – the most difficult of management assignments – at a multibillion-dollar multinational enterprise?

The role of women in the workplace is hardly a settled issue. In 2010, a U.S.-based Pew Research Center survey found that 37 per cent of adults regard mothers of young children working outside the home to be bad for society. Just 21 per cent hold the opposite view.

Women are still routinely sidelined on returning from maternity leave, the misfortune of two exceptionally able friends of mine. A recent study in the American Sociological Review determined that, given identical résumés, a mother is 70 per cent less likely to be hired and 100 per cent less likely to be promoted. Joan Williams, expert in workplace law at the University of California law school, calls it the “maternity wall.”

The blogosphere was soon flooded with posts arguing the pros and cons of Mayer’s decision, which includes not just taking the Yahoo job, but vowing to work throughout a brief maternity leave. In a cover story Thursday on Mayer, USA Today quoted a top cosmetics executive who recalled how much more difficult that course turned out to be than she had expected. “You have no idea about what is to come,” she said of the earliest months of motherhood, noting especially the drain on her energy.

The hypocrisy here is stark. “Would anyone raise an eyebrow if the new CEO of Canadian Tire was about to become a father for the first time?” a woman friend of mine who is a longtime telecom executive asked me this week.

Of course not. Mayer’s most-talked-about status this week is evidence that women still are regarded as society’s primary caregivers. In June of last year, Larry Page, cofounder and new CEO of Google Inc., Mayer’s alma mater, was reported to be expecting his second child. It was a one day news brief and didn’t trigger a national debate over Page’s ability to be a good dad while running the monster that ate the Internet.

By contrast, “It’s hard to argue that [Mayer’s] appointment isn’t a sort of gender bellwether,” says Bonnie Rochman, gender-issues columnist at Time. “If she stumbles...it won’t be chalked up solely to the sheer difficulty of her task. It’s practically inevitable that her pregnancy will be cited.”

Rochman noted a 2011 post on Business Insider by U.S. venture capitalist Paige Craig, who bluntly asserted that “A pregnant founder/CEO is going to fail her company...Birthing & raising kids seems like the toughest job around” without adding the stress of running a business.

“You don’t grow a human and turn around a company at the same time very easily,” Julia Hartz, cofounder of Eventbrite Inc., an online ticketing service, and mother of two children, told the Journal.

The odds at Yahoo do weigh heavily against Mayer, 37. She is the sixth Yahoo CEO in five years.

Revenues at the former Internet trailblazer, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., have dropped one-third in the past four years. And 2011 profits were down 17 per cent. The stock is worth only 14 per cent of its 1999 all-time high.

Tech is in turmoil. U.S. tech firms announced more than 50,000 job cuts in this year’s first half, a 260 per cent jump over the same period in 2011.

Tech turnarounds are rare, Apple Inc. aside. Once a Nortel Networks Corp., Research in Motion Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc. or Palm Inc. starts circling the drain, the laws of physics are seldom revoked.

And studies have shown that outsiders are less likely than internal hires to succeed as saviour CEOs. Mayer presided over most of the good things that have happened at Google in a 13-year stint there straight out of Stanford University, where Mayer graduated as one of the Valley’s top women computer engineers. Mayer’s Google regimen was 90-hour work weeks and weekly attendance at 60 meetings.

But Mayer lacks CEO experience. And her forte is new-product development. What Yahoo requires now is marketing, strategic direction and branding smarts, which are not Mayer’s strengths.

“Yahoo needs a strategic visionary, not a product engineer,” a Forrester analyst told Bloomberg News this week. Which is why Wall Street had hoped, and expected, that Yahoo’s board would elevate interim CEO Ross Levinsohn. He has been running the content side of a Yahoo that has evolved into a media firm.

Yahoo does show some turnaround promise. With 700 million users, it still commands one of the Web’s biggest audiences. Its email service leads its category in popularity, as do properties like Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance and Flickr, the photo-sharing site.

Yahoo managed to grind out a 2011 profit of $1 billion, not a shabby return on $4.9 billion in sales. If it can cure its longstanding identity crisis – focusing on media and giving up search, where it’s outmuscled by Google, and shed dozens of dud products like Yahoo Education, Yahoo Wallet and Yahoo Notepad – a reinvented, streamlined Yahoo might gain dominance in the new field of hybrid Web media firms, like the combination of AOL and Huffington Post.

Mayer’s unapologetic self-description as a “geek” will fit well with Yahoo’s tech-driven culture. That was a problem for marketing whiz Carly Fiorina during her turbulent stewardship of Hewlett-Packard Co.’s engineering culture.

Levinsohn, who remained with Yahoo after being passed over for Mayer’s most recent permanent predecessor, might be persuaded to stay again, and refine the media-focused strategy he has developed.

Since joining Google when it had just 19 employees and a mere 2 per cent chance of success, in Mayer’s estimation, Mayer has preferred to put herself in tight corners. Of her academic and career decisions, Mayer has said “I always did something that I was a little not ready to do. In each of those cases, I felt a little overwhelmed by the option. I’d gotten myself in a little over my head.”

Mayer’s work-family balance is bound to be fraught — even for a wealthy and married “elite” mom, as many armchair critics have described Mayer.

Golda Meir said it best, perhaps, when she was Israeli prime minister:

“At work you think of the children you have left at home. At home, you think of the work you’ve left unfinished. Such a struggle is unleashed within yourself. Your heart is rent.”

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